After much debate I've joined the https://social.freegamedev.net. After the talk about building communities I attended, I was thinking about joining twitter. Since I prefer free software, I decided this would be a better choice. Of course it means I won't get exposure like on twitter perhaps but if I can help an alternative to twitter expand that would be good.

I actually use a small trick to follow Twitter accounts on Hubzilla, similar to how the new Planets work. You can follow RSS/Atom feeds on Hubzilla by adding them as a connection (but I need to check if I have disabled or limited that for the default user level). Then I have this nice tool to fetch various services that don't provide Atom feeds: https://rssbridge.freegamedev.net/Note however that replying or @ mentioning will not propagate back to Twitter as this is a one-way bridge.

There are probably other ways to do this better, but I don't use Twitter that much to research it further.

Julius {l Wrote}:I actually use a small trick to follow Twitter accounts on Hubzilla, similar to how the new Planets work...

I don't want to follow people on twitter so don't worry about that.

When a person requests a connection what does that do? They automatically get you on their network feed? If you add them, they get on your network feed. If you ignore them, they still have your feed on their network? If you say no, do they still have your feed on their network?

I am not 100% sure about how this works across the ActivityPub bridge, but you can create privacy groups or restricted posts and those should only be visible to authorized conections. I don't think you can prevent someone from viewing public posts but I think commenting is restricted then. There are also within the Zot/Hubzilla network quite some additional permission settings like allowing others to edit your wiki etc.

Social - Federation is setup so anyone can write comments to it and view it. If I say no to a connection, the other person will see my posts but I don't see his. He can still comment. If I go to his channel, it shows that there is a one way connection. If I say ignore, the other person thinks they are connected but can't write comments and I don't see his posts. I don't know if an ignored person can still write comments if it is Social - Federation since that is public. I should probably just create a second channel and play around with it.

Edit: I guess I can't easily test as we are restricted to one channel. Not a big deal.

Hmm, yeah I really need to make the settings for user-levels a bit more fine grained. So far I didn't think regular users would have much use for multiple channels.

I need to move the Hubzilla instance to a new server this month (no worries, it will work the same, only a backend change) and afterwards I wanted to look into these things.

Edit: sadly a lot of the advanced privacy features of Hubzilla don't translate well to the world of Mastodon. This is planned to improve a bit with the back-porting of the new Zot6 protocol (upcoming Hubzilla 4.0 Edit: there seems to be some change in focus upstream, not sure what this will mean for Hubzilla, but Zot6 seems to be moving to less compatibility with other networks now ) but for now it is mostly just a one-way block-list when interacting with ActivityPub users.

Social.freegamedev.net is now moved to new server. Edit: you might experience some DNS caching related issues in the next 24h @dulsiI increased the allowed number of channels to 2 in case you still want to test it.

Yeah, most likely. I had to disable the old site to prevent messages to register as delivered there. So if your internet provider's DNS cache is still pointing to the old IP than you seem get this.

For me it works already fine on a mobile connection, but my home network provider apparently is using a much less updated DNS cache. I hope this issue will solve itself in a few hours, or alternatively you could try manually changing the DNS server for your connection temporarily.

Julius {l Wrote}:Yeah, most likely. I had to disable the old site to prevent messages to register as delivered there. So if your internet provider's DNS cache is still pointing to the old IP than you seem get this.

Julius {l Wrote}:At least over here all is fine again now, besides some minor issues with old posts and notifications popping up again (which I believe is due to the increased retention policy, but not 100% sure).

@Egberto: you can confirm things working again?

Yes, is working now (since last night) ... I feel that It took quite a bit of time.

But no worries, that was probably the last time I will move the Hubzilla server in the next couple of years. This one isn't super fast either, but has a really good price/value and plenty of SSD storage space, so I am quite satisfied.

Julius {l Wrote}:But no worries, that was probably the last time I will move the Hubzilla server in the next couple of years. This one isn't super fast either, but has a really good price/value and plenty of SSD storage space, so I am quite satisfied.

Hubzilla's ActivityPub implementation is a bit spotty I think. Try disabling and re-enabling the ActivityPub app, but it might take a short while to take effect (around 1 h max if cron related). I'll try to investigate further.

Edit: after disabling everything and re-enabling it works for me again. I hope the same is the case for you. Sorry for any issues caused.